Love for the New Members of Congress

During a House Foreign Affairs committee meeting, Rep. Omar asked Elliott Abrams, the special envoy to Venezuela for President Donald Trump’s administration, the following:

“On February 8, 1982, you testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee about U.S. policy in El Salvador,” Omar added. “In that hearing, you dismissed as communist propaganda [a] report about the massacre of El Mozote in which more than 800 civilians, including children as young as two-years-old, were brutally murdered by U.S.-trained troops.”

“During that massacre, some of those troops bragged about raping 12-year-old girls before they killed them. You later said that the U.S. policy in El Salvador was a fabulous achievement. Yes or no? Do you still think so?”

Basically, she’s asking whether the guy that trained and put weapons in the hands of right-wing militias that committed human rights abuses in Latin America will be up to his old tricks in Venezuela. It seems like a rather pertinent question to me, and one only the Muslim freshman Representative had the gumption to ask.

Of course, Abrams threw a tantrum then lied through his teeth, as The Interceptoutlines in detail.

Then, Mother Jones reported that “Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted a picture of a line of people outside a House committee hearing on homelessness. According to Ocasio-Cortez, the people in the photo are homeless and were paid by lobbyists to hold their places in line.”

I can only hope that more women (and men!) get elected to Congress follow their example and shine a light on all this nonsense. Make America Great Again, indeed.